My ramblings about all things technical

Tag Archives: ECS

*Disclaimer* Whilst I am a Dell EMC employee this is my own take around the announcement and technologies, this posting has not been reviewed nor requested by my employers and whilst I plan to give as factual information as possible nothing mentioned below can be deemed fully verified.

On Wednesday this week Dell technologies announced their new IoT Strategy, Division and Solutions to Accelerate Customer Adoption. There were a number of announcements from the event and for me this is super exciting as I have always had a very keen interest in the whole AI and IoT eco-system and what it enables and to be part of a company that is investing and looking to do so much within the arena truly excites me and so I wanted to give my own take of the announcements and possibly as more bits come out I might do a series of postings around the various solutions. Also if I am lucky enough to play with some of the new technologies being announced then I might even try do some NDA permitting pieces in a series about those as well.

Being someone who works with customers every day as part of my job to help them digitally transform and move more towards cloud computing and a centralized model of delivering IT services I have seen amazing success stories and benefits from this but now with the age of not just smart phones but smart cars, smart watches,heart monitors and a plethora of smart sensors there has become a requirement for a distributed core that allows focused real-time processing of information as these devices require instant responses rather than having to wait for a response from a centralised cloud infrastructure (if companies are even at this fairly advanced stage) that may be seconds away.

Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies linked to this change where he stated : “IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organisations operate and how the world works.Dell Technologies is leading the way for our customers with a new distributed computing architecture that brings IoT and artificial intelligence together in one, interdependent ecosystem from the edge to the core to the cloud. The implications for our global society will be nothing short of profound.” Due to this requirement from customers Dell Technologies announced the new Dell Technologies IoT Division which will be led by someone very well-known in the virtualisation arena VMware Executive Vice President and CTO Ray O’Farrell, and is chartered with orchestrating the development of IoT products and services across the Dell Technologies family. Ray set out that Dell Technologies is investing $1B in new IoT products, solutions, labs, partner program and ecosystem.

You may or may not be aware but Dell already provides Edge Gateways which are made to function at the extremes from being able to offer an operating temperature range of -30°C to 70°C and in a hardened enclosure that protects from dust, oil and weather elements, while the chassis intrusion switch sends an alert in case of unauthorized access to name two non technical features. These gateways can be managed by VMware Pulse IoT Control Centers. Lets have a deeper look at VMware Pulse IoT Control Centers:

VMware Pulse IoT Control Centers

VMware define the offering as : “ a secure, enterprise grade, end to end IoT infrastructure management solution which allows OT and IT to have complete control over their IoT use cases, from the edge all the way to the cloud. It helps companies to onboard, manage, monitor and secure all “things” and infrastructure for IoT.” Additional information around VMware Pulse seems to be very limited at the moment even for VMware partners but from what is covered in the datasheet it uses a Liota open source SDK to allow enterprises to create edge system data orchestration applications, the ability to integrate with NSX for network segment mapping (I wonder if this is using NSX-T or NSX-Cloud) and console integration with VMware Identity Manager for SSO.

Project Nautilus

The next announcement was the announcement of Dell EMC’s unified data stack for IoT called Project Nautilus which provides an extensible collection of elastic storage micro-services

Manuvir Das, SVP and GM of Unstructured Storage Division at Dell EMC gave a brilliant demo of the offering at the IQT announcement showing how Project Nautilus ingests millions of streams of data in real-time and analyzes the data in these streams in real-time as well.

Boomi

Another offering covered during the announcement that has been out for a bit is Dell Boomi, Dell Technologies enterprise integration platform as a service offering. I have only started learning about Boomi so I plan to write a separate posting about the offering and link to it here but there is a brilliant demo already available around the offering here

Other announcements

At the event, Dell Technologies also revealed new IoT services initiatives which include:

IoT Vision Workshop – Identifies and prioritises high-value business use cases for IoT data – essentially how and where to deploy IoT analytics that drive business.

IoT Technology Advisory – Develops the overall IoT architecture and road-map for implementation.In addition, with the core focus on technology and services, Dell Technologies’ strategy is to grow the IoT footprint via a strong partner program and ecosystem.Dell’s award-winning IoT Solutions Partner Program is a carefully curated, multi-tiered program consisting of 90+ partners from enterprises like Microsoft Intel and SAP to start-ups like Evolve, FogHorn and Zingbox, who also presented at the event.

Investments in IoT Future through Dell Technologies CapitalDell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, is partnering closely with the IoT division, providing industry insight and relationships to support its strategic agenda. Through its investments in promising startups and founders, Dell Technologies Capital provides a valuable link to the external innovation ecosystem, effectively accelerating the development and deployment of new IoT, AI and ML technologies and solutions.

As I stated at the beginning I am hoping to be able to write a series of postings around these offerings as I learn more about them. I’m personally really excited about the offerings and the investments being made and hopefully I can learn them and also share the knowledge around them on this blog.